Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores
unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog [PDF]

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/
http://www.toktek.org/
http://gieskes.nl/
http://www.niklasroy.com/
http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

Steve Reich had his Music for 18 Musicians.

Here’s a modular made of 18 Moogerfoogers.

And for those of you who complain that modulars can become large, expensive, hard to carry, and unwieldy…

This absolutely, positively … doesn’t help with that at all. (Happily, new desktop modular tools do, but… this is… also possible.)

And to those of you who say this seems impractical or silly, well, maybe you have five friends, and each of you has three Moogerfoogers, and you’ve wondered if you could ever form a band. Yes. Yes, you can.

This is the creation of Shout Out Out Out Out:
http://www.shoutoutoutoutout.com
http://www.auxgang.tumblr.com

After the jump, we’ll see some more practical work they’ve been up to in the studio.

First, here’s part 1 of 2…

Found via Kent Williams, on Google+.

There’s some great musical nerdery as Shout Out Out Out Out show their process tracking in the studio.

Part three of the Shout Out Out Out Out new album video diary. Winter finally drops down like a metric tonne of hammers! Gravy finds “The Button” and Will explains how recording works.

The upcoming record they’re working on here is Spanish Moss And Total Loss, due July 17th in North America from Normals Welcome Records (digital, vinyl, CD). Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, they have … a lot of analog. So much analog. And for that, and their fresh, crisp songwriting and expansive imagination, we love them!

Equipped with MIDI, a phone or tablet can communicate with a vast range of standalone hardware and computer software for music. So, what to do with that power? Two recent applications show just some of the breadth of possibility, one from Japan, one from Ukraine. One provides an array of powerful tools, combining into one application a lot of functions that have otherwise been available only in separate apps. One takes a more novel approach. Each demonstrates Apple’s increasingly-ubiquitous iPhone and iPad to be a surprisingly-indispensible musical tool.

Let’s look at the more whimsical of the two first.

From Japanese media artist and developer Masayuki Akamatsu (known as aka), MIDIWriter is a bit unlike MIDI tools you’ve likely seen before. It sends MIDI notes not from a piano keyboard or more familiar musical interface, but from the key entry you’d usually use to type in messages. That means the on-screen keyboard – even, as pictured, in another language – can become a musical instrument instead of input method for SMS and the like.

Where things get even more interesting is when you add a Bluetooth keyboard or keyboard dock, for iPad or iPhone. Then, those gadgets become physical input devices. (In the oddest example, a projected keyboard even works.)

http://akamatsu.org/aka/ios/apps/midiwriter/ [lots of great documentation, in both English and Japanese]
MIDIWriter @ apps.createdigitalmusic.com [View, install; US$0.99]

It’s all quite peculiar, but I can think of one particular advantage to doing something a bit unusual: sometimes, the best way to break out of tired musical habits is to face an unfamiliar musical interface.

In the more conventional and practical end of the pool, we have Wiksnet’s MIDI Studio. With rather lovely, refined-looking interface design, the Ukrainian app treads in the competitive waters of iOS MIDI controllers. What it does that those apps don’t necessarily do, though:
1. It adds velocity senstivity, via vibration, as seen in Apple’s own GarageBand but less-commonly in MIDI tools.
2. It combines layouts into convenient configurations, coupling, for instance, knobs with MIDI keys.

And it looks nice. A future version promises editable templates, but for many, having some nice stuff up and running without any additional effort could be a draw. From the developers, a feature list:

• Essential MIDI compatibility (Core MIDI, over WiFi and USB)
• Drum pads with modulation across X/Y axes, velocity
• Two keyboards, each with a different key size, and customizable key/tuning mappings
• Built-in arpeggiator
• Easy mapping of ADSR, etc. to knobs on the keyboard layout

http://www.wiksnet.com/
MIDI Studio @ apps.createdigitalmusic.com [View, install; US$10.99]

There’s no official view, but here’s one fan-made entry:

The Ukrainian developer has done other commercial work, they say, but this is their first unique iOS music app. The next release will have, alongside editable templates, velocity sensitivity, and will fill other user requests.

In the case of MIDIWriter, there’s not a lot of comparison to be made – desktop software has often mapped standard input and keyboards to music, but not necessarily iOS apps. With MIDI Studio, of course, we’re overdue for an overview of MIDI apps.

Let us know how you use these – or other tools, including things that don’t begin with a lowercase “i” – to produce MIDI events in your workflow.

File these designs under “do want.” Some of your favorite gear is rendered in miniature: Roland’s TR-808, E-MU’s SP-1200 sampler, Akai’s MPC 2000XL, and (coming soon) even the Yamaha NS-10 near-field monitors. It occurs to me that someday soon, such tiny things might even work in some form as functioning music equipment. For now, you’ll have to settle for tiny classic gear that contains an 8 GB flash drive – enough to carry especially-precious samples or demos or backups.

The drives are US$39.99, but contain extraordinary levels of detail and use Toshiba flash memory (not something overly generic). They work with USB 2.0, too.

The project is the work of Alkota, a musician who also offers a boutique of drum samples, including some more unique hip-hop drum sets and such. Shop:
http://hiphopdrumsamples.com/category/flash-drives

Gallery:

More on the artist:
www.alkotabeats.com
www.hiphopdrumsamples.com
www.twitter.com/alkota

Quit your job, leave your loved ones, stock up on food, and get ready to destroy your life with videos from YouTube. Network Awesome, a kind of curatorial “TV” network full of free online videos, has been assembling the best documentaries dealing with electronic music online, with hours and hours and hours of things that could basically keep you from, ironically, reading this site for the rest of the week if you like.

This isn’t just some random assortment, either. There are thoughtful assortments and surprise discoveries, including a celebrity-chosen set of some pretty far-out live shows pulled by Jan St.Werner of Mouse on Mars. (How Jan has time to watch YouTube in the midst of an obsessively-detailed production process and punishing touring schedule, I have no idea.)

As Network Awesome’s Jason Forrest tells CDM:

We have guest curated shows by Soul Clap & Mouse On Mars as well as specials on Aphex Twin, Clara Rockmore, Giorgio Moroder, Daft Punk and pretty much every other interesting electronic musician you can think of.

You can find everything on one massive archive page from last week. But here are a few favorites of mine, if the official Network Awesome page made your eyeballs fall out:

A collection of Aphex Twin videos:

An epic collection of IDM classics (remembering that the IDM dream of the 90s is alive on CDM):

Autechre – Gantz Graf
Plaid – Itsu
Aphex Twin – Donkey Rhubarb
LFO – Freak
Pan Sonic – Telakoe
Cylob – Rewind
Bogdan Raczynski – Ahou Bouken
Squarepusher – Come on My Selector
Seefeel – Fracture
Amon Tobin – Esther’s
µ-Ziq – Zombies
Oval – Ah!
Boards of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy

Channel 4′s 2001 docu “The Shape of Things That Hum” covers a significant lineup of electronic instrumental milestones, including the Minimoog, vocoder, Yamaha DX7, Fairlight CMI sampler, Simmons, Roland TB-303 and TB-808, and Akai sampler.

Live appearances by Jean-Jacques Perrey:

An all-live collection selected by Jan from Mouse on Mars:

1. Whitehouse – Live Action 39 Reseda 6-21-84
one of the coolest live electronic music perfomances ever. if kraftwerk would have performed like that they could have skipped the robot fake part and go straight to pop heaven.

2. Masonna @ Helluva Lounge, Kobe (May 2010)
not really pure electronic, rather an effect distortion cabaret in a beautiful stage design. you don’t know if any of the sounds are live and still it is such an outstanding performance.

3. Yannis Xenakis – Mycenae Alpha
it’s always hard to identify which actions exactly trigger which sounds in an electronic music performance. xenakis’ upic system provides the most obvious and honest translation: you can see exactly what you hear. as live as it gets in granular synthesis.

4. Jacques Tati – PLAYTIME
tati’s playtime is one is of my most favourite movies ever. it’s all choreographed around sound. this is a sequence in a hyper modern office building where the concierge is playing the most fantastic sequencer imaginable. replay, switch off the image and just listen to the sounds.

5. Tatu Tyni’s tap dancing cards
tatu tyni the godfather of skweee in one of his magic dance trigger performances.

6.Radioboy live @ Music Plane
perfect performance with a noble purpose. herbert as radioboy replaces the 808 with flaky cornflakes packages. bonus: introduction by mtv veteran ray cokes.

7. Michel Waisvisz – Crackle Synthesizer
michel waisvisz’ crackle synthesizer, probably the most immediate and beautiful synthesizer ever built. unfortunately it’s not michel who plays it in this video.

8. Michael Waisvisz – the Hands
so here is a clip with michel waisvisz, inventor the crackle synth. michel was also the director of steim, amsterdam’s legendary institute for electronic music research. he is using his other famous electronic instrument “the hands” in this clip.

9. Dick Raaijmakers – Intona (1992)
as there is no category for live microphonic music we lump this into live electronic. dutch composer dick raaijmakers doing all the things you ever dreamed of doing to a microphone.

10. Dj Elephant Power – Scratch Tv- Part 2
to round up this little journey into the world of concrete musical abstraction here is a live scratch anthem by dj elephant power.

Delia Derbyshire, Tom Dissevelt and Luc Ferrari feature in a collection of electronic pioneers working primarily with tape and simple electronics (before modulars and computers transformed the techniques of the medium):

Selected by The Sadnesses, Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore is seen in a series of performances and an interview. Whether she’s the only person to “master” the instrument is debatable, perhaps – but she is certainly incomparable.

The complete list:

http://networkawesome.com/special/electronic-music-week/

What if your musical instrument were gelatinous? Edible?

“Noisy Jelly” is the latest project to imagine that scenario. Thanks to the capacitive quality of gelatin (known to us Americans by the brand name JELL-O and to some simply as “jelly”), you can mix up a set of colored instruments that jiggle when you touch them. Powered by the open hardware platform Arduino to read sensors and Max/MSP to produce sound, it’s the work of a couple of Paris-based students, Raphaël and Marianne Cauvard.

Check out the terrific video featuring wide-eyed children, and specs below.

What makes this more delightful is the possibility that we’ll see orchestras of squishy, organic, edible instruments. NYC Resistor and our friend Ranjit Bhatnagar built their own instrument out of JELL-O (or fruit salad, depending on the iteration). The Gel-tone made a splash (erm, squish) as a more whimsical entry at the Guthman Musical Instrument competition, and was played and eaten at our own Handmade Lounge at Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hilariously, it debuted at (and was invented for) a JELL-O mold competition. See these couple of videos (Guthman top; Solid Sound bottom) below, and find more information on that instrument:

the resistor jeltone :: an edible toy piano [openMaterials]

How to make your own: The Resistor JelTone (I dearly hope this inspires more copy-cats. Let the gelatinous musical instrument revolution continue!)

More on the Noisy Jelly project:

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/MSP, there are absolut no sound editing in the video…
More picture at this Flickr set
And download the project PDF
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L’Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)

If you do make your own project, we’d love to see it. Perhaps a gel-orchestra is next.

Several people showed this to me; notably at DE:BUG (Deutsch)
http://de-bug.de/musiktechnik/archives/5820.html

Too much comment here will spoil the fun, so enjoy – particularly with Dubstep how-to videos becoming, bizarrely, some of the most viral things online. (Hmmm… it’s almost like kids are interested in producing a wildly-popular music genre. Strange. But I hope you’ll stick around for CDM’s new Csound Drones That Hurt Your Ears series, comi– hey, where did everyone go?)

I at least can see lovers and haters of the genre now known as “dubstep” (not to be confused with the previous genre known as dubstep) finding this amusing. But should I turn off comments, just in case?

Thanks to Berliner and serious sonic scientist Martin Backes for the find. Yes, Martin, I am stalking your Facebook page. In the blogger “journalism” field, we call that “research.”

Stockholm-based design technistas and boutique synth shop Teenage Engineering have evidently worked out how to keep busy and brighten those dark Swedish winters. They showed up in Southern California this week with a slew of new stuff to show off. And while mention of their OP-1 synth may elicit controversy in comment threads online, their booths are crowd pleasers. In contrast to the buttoned-up, business-like atmosphere of a lot of tech vendors at NAMM, TE’s whimsical science lab seems to spill out onto the show floor, and – along with more analog-tilted booths Big City and Analog Haven – attracted crowds like no other tech.

What was actually going on? There’s a new OS update and a new product. The OS update delivers new drum and sequencer modes and badly-needed MIDI sync, plus cool MIDI modulation. Combined, it seems the OP-1 has really matured – sync alone removes a major obstacle for some adopters.

The new hardware is Opbox, a combination USB host / MIDI / CV box with analog sensors – and it has pretty plug-in modules and even custom-made shoes to match. The shoes may not be terribly practical, but the Oplab fits a unique niche in hardware I/O and DIY projects – provided it’s a niche that people actually want. We’ve got some details plus some exclusive images.

OP-1 Update

New in the OS:

• Finger step-sequencer, with 32 step patterns per key and 14 polyphonic patterns. (It’s an unfortunate name, given that’s also Tim Exile’s excellent Reaktor creation. Toe? But it looks cool.
• DrumBox, a drum synth. More on that in a second.
• MIDI LFOs for modulating four parameters at once – very cool.
• MIDI sync – at last, you can sync to clock messages.

Bonus: you get Reason integration (if you enjoy superior Swedish engineering), and, oddly, a game.

http://www.teenageengineering.com/products/op-1/os-update

I ran into CDM reader Neil Bufkin on the show floor, and he’s back with a new video of the OP-1 update and other goodies. Watch:

Teenage Engineer David Ericksson also shares some thoughts with CDM on DrumBox:

The idea behind DrumBox is to provide a spiced up version of classic beat box designs with everything from digital wave-shaping to FM and more. You get 24 keys each with a custom 2 oscillator setup where you can morph between different modes. The same knob also includes a volume envelope to balance the drum sounds. It’s been very tricky to build this up using only 8 parameters and still get a versatile drum machine. The payoff is that it’s pretty hands on and when you start using the LFO’s to control these params you can really do crazy stuff.

TE also shares with CDM the rough sketch from which this feature originated, plus a look at how it looks in the final product:

Oplab

Oplab is an all-new product. It’s marketed as complementing the OP-1, but it’s really a general-purpose board. Imagine an Arduino-like prototyping platform on steroids, with stuff you’d want to use for music applications. And then imagine that, much to the surprise of me and a number of other people with whom I spoke, that they made a bare circuit board look strangely beautiful and finished. This board looks better than a lot of housings. In one box, you combine lots of I/O connections and inputs for sensors.

• Three USB connections. One turns the Oplab itself into a USB device, so you can connect to a computer. But the other two are USB hosts. That means you can use the Oplab with USB devices and no computer in sight.
• Three MIDI connections. MIDI IN, MIDI OUT, and then a third MIDI port that can be either THRU or SYNC24.
• 2 CV in, 2 CV out for analog connections – using any analog connection you like.
• Program select switches. Easy access to settings.
• Ins and outs for anything else. 2 12-bit connections can be switched to input or output, so you can do everything from add sensors to use as music controllers or drive lights or motors. Now, that’s not many connections – but notice also the headers and coming development kit.
• Plug-and-play sensors. For those who want something that lets them hack around without having wires pop up or worrying about delicate, exposed boards, TE is making ready-to-use sensors. Flip is an accelerometer, Poke a pressure sensor, and Tap a piezo. You could also make your own and save some scratch.

http://www.teenageengineering.com/products/oplab/

All of this goodness costs you – US$299 is the price for the board, sensors costs $49 each, and the pretty red tray with the sensors and board all put together top US$425. But you do get some fairly sophisticated functionality in the form of adding MIDI and CV and USB hosting. Hosting isn’t easy. This also opens up some new interconnections with devices like iOS and Android and the OP-1, since the USB hosts can negate the need for a dedicated computer for USB MIDI gadgetry.

In fact, it’s nice to see a polished, designed product that does this kind of DIY stuff; that’s something we had seen in past entries from vendors like Eowave but had largely fallen away in recent years. There’s just no question that if you’re on a budget you should look to other ways of doing this. And I think the bigger question is whether people will like this I/O setup. It won’t suit people with lots of CV, and it’ll be overkill for people with simpler setups. My guess is it’ll make a lot of people happy in between, but I honestly don’t know. Let us know if you’re intrigued.

All of this is capped off by more Teenage oddities. The latest addition: they’ve designed their own custom shoe, complete with a pouch to hold their accelerometer.

More information – and lots of ideas for how you might use the Oplab, put quite articulately if a bit scant on technical details – at:

http://www.teenageengineering.com/products/oplab/
http://www.teenageengineering.com/products/op-1/os-update

Updated: Making Over Your Lifestyle with Design

Comments are getting a bit … heated … below. So, I simply wish to take this opportunity to say, if you don’t like the chic design of Teenage Engineering’s products, you can be easily replaced.

(PS – IKEA is now based in the Netherlands, so it’s fitting this is a Dutch, not a Swedish, film. But watch and learn. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pop open a can of Budweiser and use a real synth – one with wooden endcaps – in the back of my truck, before catching the NFC championship football game. None of this Swedish nonsense. And remember, all national stereotypes in your head are completely true! America!)

It bears saying: a lot of the taste for Scandinavian design was cultivated in the US. Along with other European modernists, key designers settled places like Los Angeles, and their style mingled with American style. If you don’t like the looks (or, crucially, function) of this, tell us what you do like: more variety is better.

What’s the sound of ten Stylophones buzzing?

Truly awful — deliciously so.

Answering the question on everyone’s mind, “how could we form a band using nothing but Stylophones, and what timbres would result?”, the Los Angeles-based troupe LA Stylophonic here plays original music for the stylus-controlled electronic instrument. Adding that many Stylophones together produces a sound that can best be described as … well, unique, certainly. Composer Paul Fraser does actually give them some musical meat into which the ensemble can sink their teeth, with a minimal music-inflected, rhythmic composition that lets that buzzy, edgy sound fly. I love it.

If you think this group is alone, though, you’re sorely mistaken. Stylophone seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts, as tracked by the superb:
http://www.stylophonica.com/

Synth legend Vince Clarke bought a new stylophone for his tour. Celeb Mark Ronson jams on one on a national British talk show. Electronics lovers are building their own, using Arduino and kits. There’s a boutique retailer online that caters to those who believe only the original Rolf Harris model has the authentic sound. (An admirable philosophy, if a bit akin to searching out only high-end kazoos.) And a relaunched model is regularly out of stock, thanks to surging popularity. Not bad for an electronic instrument invented before humans traveled out of Earth’s orbit.

What I do enjoy about the hipster (nerdster?) troupe wielding their Stylophones above is that there’s some compositional intent – ultimately, that’s what lets any instrument shine. Thanks, Paul! (Directed by Nick Flessa – a moving portrait, indeed.)

And with all due respect to the late, great Steve Jobs, maybe it isn’t true that “if you see a stylus, they blew it.”

paulfrasermusic.com

Look at a music software interface – particularly a tracker-style interface – and you might easily see something resembling a spreadsheet.

So, why not gaze into the cells of a spreadsheet and begin to imagine music?

Karlsruhe-based electronic artist and programmer Patrick, cappel:nord, had just such a flight of fancy about office software. He explains:

A spreadsheet could be used as a music sequencer. If you know your spreadsheet software well, the built-in functions can be used. I don’t! I also struggle with the interface The last time I used spreadsheets is 10 years ago or so.

This was the second time trying this, so I make a lot of mistakes. It’s more a proof of concept. This was a 3-hour hack so don’t expect much from the source code. But here it is:

http://www.cappel-nord.de/files/libre-jam.zip

You have to figure out how it works for yourself. I don’t give any support .

I did it for the lulz.

Lots of similar brilliance, sounds, and geekery – like a pixel matrix for Processing, audio players, code, and music – at his blog (not recently updated, but worth plumbing anyway):

http://blog.cappel-nord.de/

Thanks to headchant for the tip!

As it happens, in the first few months of CDM’s existence, I wrote up a little story on what people were doing with Microsoft Excel:
Microsoft Excel for Music: Applications Bizarre and Useful

Applications: building a drum set, a drum machine with sequencer, databases of music, music library tracking, and even a tuning calculator. I’m sure there are more.

I hear these spreadsheets also do something with numbers and finance, but where’s the fun in that?